This is an excerpt from the upcoming March/April print edition of Alexandria Living Magazine. To read the full interview, subscribe to Alexandria Living Magazine here.
Eric Althoff
Chef Cathal Armstrong at his home in Alexandria.
Cathal Armstrong’s father loved food so much that he was appalled his son decided to become a chef. Food was to be made for love, to feed one’s family — not for profit.
“In the initial years, they really hated me cooking professionally,” Armstrong said recently over tea at his Alexandria home. “My dad always revered food as something that you did for passion…not for money.”
His Irish parents needn’t have worried. Armstrong is now one of the most honored chefs in the region, running several Alexandria restaurants, including Eammon’s, Hummingbird inside Hotel Indigo at the Old Town waterfront, and Society Fair (which he sold in 2017 and has struggled under new ownership).
Armstrong last year also opened Kaliwa at the Wharf in Washington, D.C., for which he brought to the menu an Asian flair. It took his parents a while to come around, but Armstrong said eventually they were happy for their successful son.
“It was probably 1998 when I was married, [my wife] Meshelle was pregnant, and I was starting to get my own press as a chef at [D.C.’s] Bistro Bis and my name was mentioned in the press,” he said. “Certainly, when we opened Restaurant Eve and it started getting accolades, the pride exploded in them.”
Armstrong’s Restaurant Eve, named for his daughter (Eammon’s, the fish and chips spot, is named for his son), opened in 2004 on Pitt Street in Old Town and quickly became a fixture. “When we opened Restaurant Eve, there had never really been anything like that in Alexandria‚ a formal fine dining experience,” Armstrong said, adding customers not only hopped the Potomac from Washington but came from as far away as New York and San Francisco once word got out.
Armstrong’s profile as a chef rose as Restaurant Eve enabled him to open other establishments. He met two presidents and made a trip to Thailand as a representative of the State Department to teach at a culinary school there, which laid some of the groundwork for the Asian menu at Kaliwa.
However, with little warning, Restaurant Eve closed last June after 14 years in operation. Many Alexandrians remain in mourning for the upscale eatery, but Armstrong says it was time to end that chapter. Huge amounts of money were needed to fix defective air conditioning, a hazard for food and workers in often-stifling Southern summertime heat.
Furthermore, the kitchen often flooded whenever a heavy rainstorm struck the Alexandria waterfront. More than the cosmetic and mechanical upgrades, however, was that the wow factor had begun to tarnish.
...
Kaliwa at the Wharf was coming online as Restaurant Eve was winding down, which required that he oversee lunch and dinner every day for the first few months of operation. While shuttling back and forth from D.C. to Alexandria last summer, Armstrong, who is 50, was involved in a serious car accident. He was largely unhurt, but called it a stark reminder to focus a tad less on work.
“I leaned back a little bit and let [the restaurants] run by themselves without me being in the kitchen all day every day,” he said, adding that effective staffing allows him to take a bird’s-eye view of his culinary empire. “I’ll spend three or four hours researching a dish rather than five or six hours expediting dinner service. That works better for me.”
Going Forward
Armstrong returns to Ireland about once per year to visit his mother, Angela (Gerry died in 2014), and acknowledges that while the Emerald Isle remains a special place, Alexandria is home.
He continues overseeing operations at Hummingbird, Eammon’s and other restaurants. Down the road, Armstrong hopes to open what he calls a more traditional Irish restaurant as opposed to the Americanized pubs with their “leprechauns and green beer.”
Armstrong, who attended a Gaelic language school in Ireland—where they played the traditional game of hurling instead of soccer—says he has already conceived of the cookbook for that enterprise, and would like to infuse it with some of the music and traditions of his homeland.
And maybe, just maybe, he’ll reinvent Restaurant Eve at some point “in all its beauty in Old Town” in another iteration.
This is an excerpt from the upcoming March/April print edition of Alexandria Living Magazine. To read the full interview, subscribe to Alexandria Living Magazine here.
